Certain systems for editing and controlling television broadcast signals have been described in several U.S. patents, especially editing of commercial messages from transmitted broadcast signals.
Prior work has used pre-determined mechanisms and conditions to edit and delete commercials. Such mechanisms include a trial and error mechanism to eliminate commercials using forward record and backward rewind control of video cassette records (VCRs), based on commercial interval length, as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,782,834 (Koombes), 4,750,052 (Poppy et al.), 4,782,401 (Faerber), and 4,602,297 (Reese). Other mechanisms include preset timers for commercial message to avoid recording commercials on VCRs as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,918,531 (Johnson), and 4,979,047 (Wine).
Pre-determined conditions include the transmission of encoded record and/or edit command signals from central stations to inhibit unwanted contents from being recorded or displayed as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,520,404 (Kohorn), and 4,750,213 (Novak), superposing on the video signal a digitized code containing time-start information for program identification, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,611 (Fukui et al.), and other conditions such as deleting of color commercials in a monochrome program, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,283,735 (Jagger).
It would be of significant value to have a method and apparatus capable of classifying patterns in general, based on audio and video signal characteristics, without some or all of the above mentioned pre-determined mechanisms and conditions. Classifications can be done for several distinct patterns, including television programs and commercials, and the classification process could be done continuously. It would also be advantageous for the method to be similarly useful for classifying the patterns into classes to be stored, recorded or displayed in respective storage, recording or display devices.